in black and green with royal gold trim. After dark it was a jewel box awash in an infernal red glow, like the light inside an oven. Wurlitzer music floated up and down the beach, discordant strains that sounded like a Romanian waltz, something for a nineteenth-century ball attended by Dracula and his icy white brides.
It was the most striking feature of Cape Maggie’s run-down, seedy harbor walk. The harbor walk had been run-down and seedy since my grandparents were kids. The air was redolent with the cloying perfume of cotton candy, an odor that doesn’t exist in nature and can only be described as “pink” smell. There was always a puddle of vomit on the boardwalk that had to be avoided. There were always soggy bits of popcorn floating in the puke. There were a dozen sit-down restaurants where you could pay too much for fried clams and wait too long to get them. There were always harassed-looking, sunburned grown-ups carrying shrieking, sunburned children, the whole family out for a seaside lark.
On the pier itself, there were the usual stands selling candied apples and hot dogs, booths where you could shoot an air rifle at tin outlaws who popped up from behind tin cacti. There was a great pirate ship that swung back and forth like a pendulum, sailing high out over the sides of the pier and the ocean beyond, while shrill screams carried into the night. I thought of that ride as the SS Fuck No. And there was a bouncy house called Bertha’s Bounce. The entrance was the face of an obscenely fat woman with glaring eyes and glistening red cheeks. You took your shoes off outside and climbed in over her lolling tongue, between bloated lips. That was where the trouble started, and it was Geri Renshaw and I who started it. After all, there wasn’t any rule that big kids, or even teenagers, couldn’t play in the bouncy house. If you had a ticket, you could have your three minutes to leap around—and Geri said she wanted to see if it was as much fun as she remembered.
We went in with five little kids, and the music started, a recording of small children with piping voices, singing a highly sanitized version of “Jump Around” by House of Pain. Geri took my hands, and we jumped up and down, bounding about like astronauts on the moon. We lurched this way and that until we crashed into a wall and she pulled me down. When she rolled on top and began to bounce on me, she was just goofing, but the gray-haired woman who’d taken our tickets was watching, and she shouted, “NONE OF THAT!” at the top of her lungs and snapped her fingers at us. “OUT! This is a family ride.”
“Got that right,” Geri said, leaning over me, her breath warm in my face and pink-scented. She had just inhaled a cloud of cotton candy. She was in a tight, striped halter top that left her tanned midriff bare. Her breasts were right in my face in a very lovely way. “This is the kind of ride that makes families, if you don’t use protection.”
I laughed—I couldn’t help it—even though I was embarrassed and my face was burning. Geri was like that. Geri and her brother Jake were always dragging me into situations that excited and discomfited me in equal measure. They led me into things that I regretted in the moment but were later a pleasure to remember. Real sin, I think, produces the same emotions, in the exact opposite order.
As we exited, the ticket collector stared at us the way a person might look at a snake eating a rat, or two beetles fucking.
“Keep your pants on, Bertha,” Geri said. “We did.”
I grinned like an idiot but still felt bad. Geri and Jake Renshaw would take shit from no man, and no woman either. They relished verbally swatting down the ignorant and the self-righteous: the twerp, the bully, and the Baptist all the same.
Jake was waiting with an arm around Nancy Fairmont’s waist when we came reeling across the pier. He had a wax cup of beer in the other hand, and he gave it to me as I walked up. God, it was good. That right there might’ve been the best beer of my life. Salty and cold, the sides of the cup beaded with ice water, and the flavor mixed with the briny tang of the sea air.